The traffic jam excuse

 I used to live in a country on the other side of the world — actually it was Brazil in the old days. Whilst many things in Brazil delighted me, one shock that Brazilians were always very late. It was already a surprise to find out how late they ate dinner — often not until nine at night. But I discovered that time was purely theoretical — by the time all the guests arrived it was often ten thirty or eleven o’clock.

In those days restaurants never took reservations because they could not trust the patrons to arrive on time, so the popular restaurants had queues outside. One popular Italian restaurant had the smart idea of serving snacks and drinks to the people in the queue — this was so successful that people had often lost their appetite by the time they got a table. One time I was surprised to find that the owner had removed a couple of tables near the entrance. I asked “Surely that’s bad for business — you should be adding tables.” He replied “I found out I make much more money out of the people in the queue than the people dining, so I had to make space for more queue.”

When people were late they always blamed traffic jams. Sometime I got quite annoyed by this — I had come by the same route and there wasn’t any traffic jam. I asked my friend why people always used this lame excuse. He replied “You foreigners don’t understand. We used to make lots of different excuses, but it all got too complicated and we had to spend hours thinking of new excuses. After a while we realized it was much more relaxing if we all made the same excuses.”

Isn’t it an odd world that we live in? — HOWARD D. BELTON, President, Philippine Business for the Environment